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intuition

Who taught you what boundaries were allowed or expected? It’s not a subject taught in kindergarten or elementary school. Boundaries are demonstrated socially. They are both subtle and exacting.

The greatest cause of suffering I see in sensitive people originated from a lack of clear boundaries.

Your parents may have told you “no,” punished, shamed or discouraged you from activities that made them feel uncomfortable, crossed their boundaries. They may have had no boundaries or a lot or rules about touch, words, privacy, food, allowed emotions, money, how to dress, nudity, topics of conversation, personal space, time, performance at school, in sports or work.

The rules you learned at home may not have worked at school or with your friends who had different boundaries.

You need healthy boundaries. When another person shows you their boundaries you know how to relate with them. They create a clear container for understanding your world.

When the adults around you growing up don’t have boundaries, don’t honor your boundaries or change the rules frequently, it creates a state of heightened alert. The good news is that you likely have stronger than average intuition. The bad news is you have it because you didn’t feel safe and had to intuitively read the world around you all the time, to navigate the shifting boundaries.

Intuitively tracking those around you all the time is exhausting and confusing. It’s exhausting because you don’t get to relax into a sense of safety. It’s confusing because often the energy or feelings you sense in those around you gets misinterpreted as your own experience. Keeping your psychic antenna open all the time blurs the boundaries.

For example, you work at an office and have a passive aggressive co-worker. You find yourself feeling angry a lot but can’t say why. When you leave work, the anger subsides. Because you are immersed in their energy with no boundaries it feels like your own anger. Reading the mood of those around you is a skill learned in order to camouflage and create a safe space in an environment with unpredictable boundaries.

As child in an environment of unclear or absent boundaries reading others to protect yourself and prevent harm is essential to survival. But to read someone this way is to get in their psychic space. Over time this survival skill creates suffering because you feel everything around you. So how do you learn to reset your psychic boundaries?

Resetting your boundaries so intuition can work for you rather then against you requires consciously owning your energy field on a regular basis. Practicing simple active meditation tools is what works for me. A series of visualizations that create healthy energy boundaries can be applied on a walk or in a conference room. In the simplest form, you notice your grounding cord, set your aura bubble, put up protection roses and call your energy back to yourself.

To feel more of you and less of those around you isn’t hard-hearted. You still have compassion and can even help others more when you aren’t matching their emotional state.

Meditation is a pathway to strong intuition and inner-peace. You don’t need to sit with your eyes closed to meditate. I’m an active person and need to move my body. Walking meditation is the way that I have been able to more consistently commit to meditation and insure I regularly set my energy to my truth. In this video I share with you the steps I take to clear out and reset my energy field with walking meditation.

You have intuition. Ultimately it’s a matter of whether you notice it or not. When your intuition is doing its job it keeps life flowing in synchronistic ways. Divinely timed opportunities show up and you say “yes”. You’re invited to do something that sounds amazing but you don’t feel right about it and decline. Your intuition is informing your yes and no. You’re in the flow.

But that’s not always the case. You are culturally conditioned to ignore and deny your intuition. It starts in the earliest moments when you point something out to your parents that they are uncomfortable seeing and they tell you it is not true. When you deny your intuition, life doesn’t feel so easy. You run into roadblocks, bump into things, have to redo what you already thought was done, and find yourself suffering from painful experiences you could have avoided.

The great news is that intuition is a skill you can reclaim and strengthen. It never went away. It simply has been hidden from your view. There are 3 keys to improving access to your intuition.

The first key is to consciously listen. In order to hear your inner-voice you have to press pause on your mind’s analysis of the situation. It sounds simple but it is one of the most challenging aspects of being human, to get the mind out of the way of intuitive information.

Your intuition speaks to you is through body sensations. It lets you know if something is the best course for you or not with feelings such as tightness in your belly, hair standing up on your neck, tension relief, a relaxation of the shoulders or jaw.

To focus your listening, directly ask yourself a question and notice which response causes you to feel a deep peace. You may have butterflies about the decision if it challenges how people see you or receiving outside approval. But beneath that edge you will know it is right for you.

The second key to improving access to your intuition is to clear out conditioning from society, family and past experiences. These influences distort your intuition. They are static interfering with clearly hearing your inner-voice, a combination of the beliefs, needs and fears of those around you. This includes your past experiences that may or may not have truth in the present moment.

The third key is to overcome your doubt. Doubt undermines intuition. It can be as intense as triggering a trauma like experience that causes you to go blank, not knowing what to do next. Or it can be as unconscious as ignoring your gut feeling to take an alternate route home only to get stuck in a traffic jam.

The way to overcome doubt is to practice acting on your intuition. Maybe you pull up the route home on your phone and look at the traffic to validate your intuitive hit. Or maybe you courageously say what you sense to a friend and discover you are right. The more you practice, the more validation you will receive. Validation will help you gain confidence and clarity.

These 3 simple keys: listen, clear out conditioningand overcome doubt, will help you unlock the door to your intuitive ability. As you trust your intuition life becomes more synchronistic and you will experience less suffering from taking actions that were not true to you.

Life tests us when we least expect it. We can get metaphysical and see it as an opportunity for spiritual growth, yet tests challenge us. They feel uncomfortable, stressful, confusing and even painful, they may bring up our anger or disappointed. Tests are asking us, or forcing us, to change. It can be as subtle as a shift of our thought patterns or as explicit as how we live every day.

Our physical body, mind, emotions and soul are always unconsciously striving for a state of alignment with each other. An illness may cause our mind to struggle with our body’s lack of cooperation. The death of a loved one may cause our heart to question the body’s purpose as we are left behind while their soul has moved on.

In the midst of being tested, there is a temptation and a tendency to suppress discomfort. But our physical and emotional discomforts are indicators. They will guide us through life’s tests, if we listen. They bring awareness to our combined physical, mental and spiritual state of being.

To lessen the discomfort without just postponing it, we have to pause to listen to our intuition. The act of stilling the mind through meditation, tuning into our breath (body) and listening to our soul, may initially draw our attention to the discomfort. But with a bit of commitment to breathing through the edgy space, it will reduce our suffering.

When we listen to our inner-guidance it shows us what we need in order to walk through the fire of life’s test. It may tell us it is time to step away from a relationship or job. It may point out that it is time to commit to our health by changing the way we eat or to taking regular time for our creativity.

Meditation is deep listening. By listening we are consciously participating in alignment of our physical experience with our souls intention. This alone reduces stress regardless of life test we are experiencing.

The beauty is that we don’t have to stop living to listen. As Thich Nhat Hanh says we can invite inner-peace through consciously breathing in and out no matter where we are or what challenge we are facing. It is that simple.

The mind does an excellent job of balancing our bank account and other logical tasks. But when it looks to translate our emotional experiences or the more mystical intuitive “knowing”, it gets stuck. Over analyzing is the number one block to our intuition. We mentally stack the bits of and pieces of our experiences next to each other looking for an answer.

There’s no winning when the mind tries to figure out what we “sense” intuitively using evidence, logic and proof. Or if it tries to figure out what we can’t know, what hasn’t happened yet or is not ready to be revealed.

The monkey mind’s searching, busy; spinning in circles on the same unanswerable thought is merely a distraction from listening. Our inner guidance can only be accessed when we stop trying to figure it out and listen.

I’m never at peace when my mind is stuck thinking and rethinking on a topic, trying to figure out what it means and how that meaning applies to my life or what I need to do in response. The mental effort gets in the way of listening and trusting the inner-knowing.

Recently I’ve been practicing “living in the question” by asking my inner-guidance a question with a commitment to not “think” about the answer. I simply set the intention that I’m listening for an answer and put it into the universal flow to percolate.

Using this practice, I find that answers to my deepest questions don’t jump into my mind like a thought. They come through experiences life offers me that I feel a “yes” to. And as I say yes, I realize, “Hey, this is the answer to the question I sent out to the universe.”

The wonderful thing about the mind is that we get to both benefit from its skill and direct it. To turn off the monkey mind we need to remind ourselves when there is no answer we can “think up.” The answer exists but it’s not one the analytical mind is responsible for deriving.

Here’s an experiement to practice release of the monkey mind, write down whatever your mind is churning on and if you have any possible answers already milling in your head, tell yourself that there are possibilities you can’t even imagine. Then ask your inner-guidance to show you and set the question aside while you go about your life. This is where the magic comes. By releasing the attachment to “figuring it out” with your mind you are allowing your intuition to inform you.

You might think your family didn’t teach you much about your intuition but they did. Whether they taught you to doubt your gut feelings by telling you that you were wrong when you voiced something you sensed but couldn’t prove, or they simply were living examples of listening to their inner-voice; they taught you something.

One way I was taught to tune-in to my intuition by my family was through working with my dad on the ranch. There were always projects to do. The list was never ending with land, livestock, buildings, fences and equipment to keep in order. Dad would often have me and my brother help him when he was working on a project. He did most of the heavy lifting and our job was to keep him in his efficiency-zone by handing him whatever tool he needed next, holding a board in place or plugging in a power tool.

While he taught us how to do things along the way and verbally asked us to hand him the next tool or piece of material he needed early on, over time we were expected to know what he needed next, to read his mind and be one step ahead of him as he worked. This was also the way his dad, our grandfather worked. My brother and I learned to either be savvy enough to know what was next in the project or intuit their next step.

We were experiencing non-verbal communication. As the helpers we tuned-in to what was happening and kept track of the fast pace that activity was moving. We not only were tuned-in to whether a next tool was needed but if it was time to get dad a drink of water.

Practicing awareness of another through observation and intuitively tuning-in to foresee what they may need next was one of the languages of our family. In the full throws of a project if we weren’t tuned-in it could mean someone got hurt or the rhythm or efficiency was broken. It also insured we didn’t get scolded for being lazy and not doing our part.

Reading or empathically feeling others emotions and translating that into what to do for them is one of the tricky areas where we can either be affirmed or taught to doubt ourselves in a family. The nice thing about intuiting the material next steps of a ranch project is that it not as dicey of ground as intuiting someone’s emotions and knowing how to respond.

Our families subtly teach us how to use or disregard our intuition. As we identify some of the ways this occurred in our life, we can use it to reclaim or further hone our intuitive awareness.

People often ask me why I don’t “read” the future in my psychic work. I have a canned answer about us all having “freewill” that allows us to change our future. I believe this, but there is more. Thinking we can know what we “should” do or what is coming next is a way to try to feel in control and limits healthy possibilities.

Whenever I want to know what’s next, I see it as me trying to assure myself, be in control of the unknown. I wonder, “Why don’t I feel safe with the mystery of not knowing?” I may be afraid of failure if I make a poor choice, or attached to a specific outcome that I think will result in my happiness. My attachment to an outcome has narrowed the possibility of what can make me happy because when an alternate experience unfolds, I may not enjoy it even if it’s better than what I thought I wanted!

Believing we can know the future allows us to feel we are in control but it is actually a way of giving our power away. I think of the family who has planned a vacation to Hawaii. The reservations for hotel, flights, and specific tours are all scheduled in advance. The kids are going to be in surf lessons while the parents are on a dolphin sighting boat tour. But then something doesn’t turn out as planned. The tour bus taking them to the beach gets a flat. They are waiting on the side of the road for hours; sweating, hungry, feeling like their vacation is ruined. Disappointed because what they had envisioned for their holiday isn’t happening.

Beside them another couple is talking with two locals in a old truck that stopped to see if the bus driver needed help. The other couple accepts the invitation to walk down the road to a few houses and sit on the porch in the shade with coconut water, enjoying conversation. They make new friends and give up on the tour bus all together, walking a bit farther to a local’s beach to explore the tide pools. They have a better day than they ever imagined because they are open to the possibility of what the universe offers rather than staying attached to their vision of how the future should have looked.

Like the more adventurous couple, we claim our power by trusting our intuition to guide us in the moment. There’s only power in the present. In the present we have options, choices that direct our life toward either fulfillment or disappointment. Disappointment is rooted in wanting something that doesn’t happen.

Making plans and having dreams are some of the best parts of being human. Allowing our intuition to be our life tour guide is where the magic comes in. When we surrender to the mystery, our journey’s take the most remarkable turns! I have no interest in knowing the future because I want to be surprised by life’s infinite possibility.

At times in life I notice I’m not putting my priorities in the right order. The tyranny of the urgent, whether it’s someone else’s request or something I expect of myself, has me neglecting what I know in my heart is most important… my physical/mental/spiritual health, the people I love, life balance. Two weeks ago my priorities were put to the test. I had a business trip lined up, meetings, airfare, hotel, rental car and my dad was being hospitalized for a blood transfusion with a mystery illness that had been wearing him down for six weeks with fever, fatigue, then stomach pain and lots of weight loss. I live in Colorado, he lives in Oregon. I intuitively knew his life was in danger when I had seen him last but he was too feverish to realize it, besides no one in Urgent Care had expressed much worry about his progressive deterioration.

That Monday morning I was struggling with what to do, Dad was playing down how serious it was when I spoke with him on the phone. Should I keep my work commitments or go be with my Dad who I knew was fighting for his life, without a diagnosis? In the state of emotional stress I realized I needed support to follow through with my desire to drop everything and drive to Oregon. I texted a friend and asked if he would drive with me. When he said yes, I felt a huge relief and started taking action to cancel my business trip that was meant for the next day. As soon as it was decided a big wave of peace washed over me. I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring but I knew that my priorities were right and I would have no regrets.

In moments of crisis, decisions can feel overwhelming and doing what we need to do feel impossible. It seemed all the tools I had for centering, self-reflection and getting clear weren’t within reach. I called on those who know me best to be my anchor and remind me not to doubt my intuition. To ignore my dad’s “don’t worry,” to set aside my clients “I need the demonstration this week,” and choose what would bring peace for my soul. I had to press beyond my fear of letting others down, be it family or business associates, and lean on the strength of friends.

At my technology job it was one of the worst possible times for me to need to redirect my energy to family. I reflected on the sage advice from my manager Bill at my first job after college, “Is it going to matter in 50 years? If not, don’t stress about it.” In 50 years it would matter if I was there for my dad and it wouldn’t matter if I postponed my business trip.

When the time came to let work know my circumstances, I received 100% support from colleagues, clients and management. I felt the grace of their understanding and acknowledgement that we are all human with needs that come before work.

After being quarantined and run through many tests, they discovered my dad had a parasite, one that kills 100,000 people a year and almost killed him, but is curable! What a relief that it was discovered in time. And while he’s recovering, I’ve been able to be here at the family Ranch for more time than I thought would be possible for me this year; a blessing in disguise. This is in a profoundly nurturing place for my soul. I’ve also had time to spend with my mom and brother who are both facing different mystery health challenges, and witnessed many surprising layers of family healing.

I was reminded from this experience that when I feel confused and am struggling to get clear on my intuitive truth, it’s still there. I just have too much emotion between me and it, to see it clearly. At those times I can call on the people who know me best to help me clear away the emotional-charge and get grounded enough to see.

It all comes back to trust. When I went through my divorce at age 27 one of the big lessons I learned was that intimate love isn’t sustainable without trust. If you don’t trust your partner to consider your needs when they make choices that impact you, it disrupts the flow of love. Yet the root of trust is in our relationship with our Self. Recently one of my teachers put it to me this way, “You have to trust yourself to face and work through whatever life presents.”

It is not about the trustworthiness of another so much as trusting ourselves to make a good choice and to handle whatever life brings. An unspoken pain we feel when someone we trust betrays us is Self-doubt. Why didn’t I see that coming? We may experience love and trust most measurably in our response to others but we first have to trust our Self. Trusting our Self is an expression of Self-love.

To cultivate awareness and understanding of our intuition we have to start with trust. It takes trust to listen to the messages from our heart, soul and body, the gut feeling or sense of what is our correct path regardless of outside validation. We often over-analyze our intuitive insights by stacking the information up next to what we consider as facts; the provable data.

That provable data comes from past experiences, information the world tells us is reliable, evidence bent on helping us feel safe and in control of the outcome. This logic first approach is a natural survival response, assessing the potential outcome of a choice and our safety in the situation. Yet it undermines our inner-guidance.

Most of us can reference times in our life where we discounted our intuitive voice and continued down a path that had a less than desirable outcome. In retrospect we acknowledged that we knew that the path wasn’t in alignment with our truth but something stopped from listening to that voice. We let the facts create doubt, or made a comfortable choice rather than one that was a bit uncomfortable which would have offered us greater ease and less pain in the long run.

Another facet of learning to trust our Self is being able to decipher when we are projecting onto a situation our desired outcome, rather than seeing it clearly. I truly believe that we have aspects of destiny at play in our lives and to meet our soul’s mission we can either do so with ease and grace by listening to our inner-guidance or we can struggle through it resisting the less comfortable path. We’ll still get there but the journey through the lessons of our soul’s mission is more tiresome and painful when we don’t trust or inner-guidance.

Learning to trust our Self is as simple as listening to our intuitive nudges. Most often our intuition speaks gently to us and we have to slow down and intentionally listen to hear it. It is not a drill sergeant demanding we pay attention and act in accordance to its directive. Rather our intuitive-guidance is a resource we can choose to open up to. A partner in the path of life whom we can cultivate trust with just as with any relationship, through experience.

When people ask me what I do the conversation always gets interesting. I balance both a mainstream technology career with my soul work as a clairvoyant. People are really curious about what it’s like to be a psychic. The word itself is loaded with assumptions, religious judgments, fear and misinformation. They often ask, “How is it that you see things?” Every psychic sees a bit differently but there are many similarities in how we see, in clairvoyant images, clairaudient hearing or clairsentience touch of an object or personal item to knows it’s story. I see information visually, a stream of images crossing my minds-eye and tap into a stream of consciousness that is available on the non-linear plane and translate it into words.

When I’m in a clairvoyant reading space I am looking at the soul signature of the person who has given me permission to do the reading. Every soul is unique, which is why it doesn’t matter if the person is in the same room or on the other side of the planet. It’s like tuning into a radio frequency or going to a websites IP address. People come with questions or a desire for healing in certain areas of their life such as relationship, career, finances and health.

With a psychiatrist, one expresses their feelings, analyzes the motivations, comes to understand and change mental/emotional habits that are not constructive in order to reduce their stress. The intent of psychology is to heal emotional wounds and feel more at peace. The form of clairvoyant work I do, accesses a deeper subconscious layer often out of reach with psychology. This view point looks at one’s souls history which some call the Akashic Records or Book of Life.

Unresolved experiences from the past unconsciously influence the present experience. When I read, I look at the spiritual body, the unconscious layers of experiences that continue to influence what a person is attracting into their life. These aspects frequently find us repeating similar situations, relationships, etc. even after we have worked through and changed the psychological pattern.

Behind every question I’m asked is the desire for change, something isn’t going the way the person would like it to. They want to experience life differently, with inner-peace, a sense satisfaction or dreams fulfilled. As I scan the aura, I use the chakras as a map of the body’s energy field indicating what the energy is related to: safety/survival (1st), creation/sexuality (2nd), power/manifestation (3rd), giving/receiving love (4th), communication (5th), analytical and intuitive mind (6th), connection with spirit (7th). I identify where there are blocks to the person creating the experiences they want. These area’s light up and that’s where I dive in deeper to then see the origin of the pattern.

As I watch this information presented, like a flow of images on a movie screen in my mind’s eye, I communicate what I’m seeing in the clearest way possible to the person I am reading. In parallel, I am silently communicating with the spirit realm intervening on their behalf to erase blocks, deprogram ineffective belief systems, move out foreign energies and release any unresolved energetic charge from the past that is holding the person back in that specific area.

I choose to use my clairvoyance for healing, this means while I see future potential outcomes I don’t believe in reading them. It is my personal desire not to promote attachment to a future that will change as we make choices that affect our life. This keeps the door open for our choices to mold our life moment-by-moment into something more beautiful than we may have ever imagined.

While only some of us decide to hone our ability to see and understand what we are seeing to the extent that those labeled psychic have. I believe that all of us have intuitive awareness available to us. We can each cultivate more of it through awareness, clearing out the cobwebs of our own agenda and learning tools for interpreting what we see.[subscribe2]

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